The annotated budak

No ride or wrong

When you are flying by wire and running high on a life you never knew nor wanted, all it takes to send you crashing down to a gray heaven is a tap on the shoulder and a moment too soon. I don't know whom I am talking to any more and it doesn't matter, for you couldn't care less either and it's all I can do to cling to this thin, dead line that refuses to break and leaves my heart in midair, up for grabs but also out of reach.

Big on bark

Fair-sized spiders in their own right, standard issue lichen huntsmen are masters of camouflage that hide in plain sight and shimmy to unreachable heights when betrayed by their eyeshine at night. They are creatures of habit, however, and are likely to be found at their original spots after a few minutes of silence. It's a wonder how they spy and secure flighty prey in the dark, but still they do, although land shrimp in their shiny armour are left well alone for some reason.  

This hairy beast, however, was impossible to miss, even in the damp shadows of a mid-morning walk by Sungei Tua. With a legspan a mere inch or two short of a foot, the spider, probably Heteropoda boiei, is a likely contender in size with a troglodytic cousin in Laos. The habitat was a disturbed primary forest that still harboured a canopy rich enough to be haunted by operatic gibbons. This huntsman occurs in Borneo as well, it seems, but no record exists, alas, for the species in Singapore, where there are probably not enough big trees and robust prey to sustain a population of large, latigrade stalkers in lucid green and blotchy brown.

A high strung theme

The route is the same, but a good few metres higher. From the hill above the harbour, the cabin dips over towering pulai trees, vine-strewn patches of dillenia and secretive mansions before the green slope gives way to a habitat of highways and low roofs. The city peeps behind a sea of cranes and the ascent to Pulau Selegu yields a fowl's-eye-view of a shoal where opportunities were lost and lives were wasted. It's a theme that runs again and again with few variations and little room for development, for natural wealth offers few attractions with the power to compete with parks that offer more profitable motivs and the reward of atrocities in taste.

Pretty crabby

Lophozozymus pictor, Cyrene Reef.

Shucks

What I liked about Aquaria KLCC: the informative freshwater displays, mangrove setup and marine touch pools. What irks: the tiny indoor enclosures for water rats, small-clawed otters and coatimundis; the tremendous chunks of dead coral used in the reef tanks and 90m walk-through tunnel; and the hillbilly crowd who assesses each creature based on their palatability and pays no heed to facts with neither the means to persuade nor the power to win over families of misconceived notions.

Hop you can't see me

It's always a dilemma whether one should stride on to cover promising new ground or stick around a lush spot and hope that in time, discrete shapes and shadows will emerge from the undergrowth. Far too often, life lurks in plain view. And yet the eye scans in vain, seeing nothing to distinguish beast from a background of bark and branch.

It took a twitch and shudder while my lens were aimed at another, tinier, thing, to reveal that one patch of lichen on a tree at Hutan Lipur Lentang bore widely spaced eyes, blue-and-white limbs and a cloak of veins in a series of shades that rendered it nigh indistinguishable from the living fissures of the trunk. The pretender was a large planthopper, probably an eurybrachyid or flatid, with a body that barely broke the lay of its vertical home. Finding itself still intact despite having given the game way, the bug crept about in a middling attempt to secure a safer perch and vanish from sight before other, hungrier, eyes spy a treat with but a single trick.